Recent reviews by clonestravaganza

one of the best spiritual sequels to pac-man that we're ever going to get

His name was Detective Hardboil and he was, top-to-bottom, covered in lacerations.

Hooting like a creatine-fueled quarterback at the big game, the detective bounced off of an exposed bit of ventilation and tumbled unceremoniously onto the sidewalk from four stories up, having just vaulted from a window he had viciously interrogated with his fists. Undeterred by what would kill a non-investigative entity, he leapt atop a nearby dumpster and onto a fence with the catlike grace of a trained assassin, deftly running across the top.

Twenty minutes ago, murder was committed at some nondescript mid-rise apartment block. Hardboil had been cleaning the air vents of a neighboring building with his body when the call came in. He needed money. Desperately.

In one hand, Hardboil held a pair of dossiers: One designed to detail minute lifestyle details of his current suspect, and the other listing an unrelated but markedly grotesque amount of credit card numbers. Like, at least two hundred.

His other hand gripped firmly into a trash can, fingers crunching into the aluminum like crumpled paper.

With a wild heave, Hardboil sent the can hurtling through a home's window. Leaping into the living room of his suspect, the detective did what any experienced sleuth would do: Broke every fragile object, swiped all of the money, spilled milk on every conceivable piece of furniture and lifted a sweet as hell vintage sword for future detective-themed purposes. Finders keepers.

As Hardboil stuffed his pockets with coins, the alleged killer walked into the living room. He barely had enough time to shout in surprise before the detective whipped around at a velocity that should have separated his meat from his skeleton. Like the naval gun of a warship, Hardboil fired his trusty trash can towards the suspect's head with such a malicious level of force that, on impact, the man flew twenty feet back into his kitchen sink with his limbs splaying out like a freshly splatted insect.

Without missing a beat, the detective pulled a scanner from his pocket and inspected the suspect's footprint. Shoe size seven. Fit the killer's description, all right: As a matter of fact, that's the only info Hardboil had to go off of.

Handcuffing the murderer, Hardboil beat him with a nearby claw hammer for two minutes before punching all of the glass panes out of the windows around the apartment and escaping into the night with that sick sword. Case closed. Another crime handled in Stankville.

7:45AM. I rip out of my driveway in dad's old Ford F-150 and hit the corner hard, tearing through a group of three joggers on the sidewalk. They flip through the air like confetti. I flick the wipers on. Doesn't matter. I've got a date at Storage Steve's on Fourth and Hell.

Tripling my kill count along the way, I roar through the chain-link fence surrounding ol' Steve's. A few veterans of the storage-vulture trade recognize the truck as it pulls in. Some flee. I skid to a stop, fishtailing into a grandmother.

"Opening bid's $300," the auctioneer calls out to the crowd as I step out of the truck.

"Eight million," I shout as I stride into the fray of would-be buyers. The crowd disperses.

The auctioneer smiles and hands me the key to the storage unit. The moment he lets go of the key, he's gone, like an almost-remembered gap in the memory or a "spot the difference" game with only one picture. I pay the concept no mind. That's just how auctioneers are.

Crunching my hand into the sheet metal and tearing the door free, I blink in surprise. Guns. Guns! It looks like an armory in here, stocked by somebody with a fear of shelves. Had anybody else outbid me, they could have armed a small militia and finally put an end to my truck's rampage through the sleepy suburb. Tough luck, you clowns: I'd been playing online blackjack for sixteen hours straight.

7:45PM. After unceremoniously backing my flatbed full of AK-47s through the front door of my home, I crack open my laptop and start posting listings on my shop site at the speed of light:
"COOL NERF GUN FOR CHILD BUY NOW"
"EASY MAGIC WAND **LEARN FIREBALL IMMEDIATELY**"
"AK-48 THE SEQUEL!! NEW KIND OF WEAPON FOR ANY FUTURE SOLDIER"
"TWO GUNS AT THE SAME TIME (CANT DUAL WIELD WITHOUT THIS AUCTION!!)"

Ping! Ping ping ping! Here they come. The customers. My life force.

"I'm $35,000 short for this listing- Would you take a $5,000 bid?" one asks.
"No. In fact, my new offer is $90,000," I reply.

They consider it.

They agree.

It's Gunfire Reborn, except you're punching robots in the face instead of Qin Shi Huang's terracotta soldiers

In like, ten... Maybe fifteen years' time, some Silicon Valley business executive in his mid-40s is going to drunkenly explain his idea for the "Call of Duty killer" to whatever neural network megalith we have to look forward to permeating every fiber of our existence in due time. And it's going to give that guy this exact game.

Is this game good? No.

It is a blatant knockoff of everybody's favorite trillion-dollar AAA shooter right down to the UI. Everything, down to the trailer currently on the page for this game, is optimized for mobile gameplay. And for a mobile player, it is probably awesome to have a Call of Duty clone available for your phone that isn't trying to use your poor processor to mine some kind of new fun coin. I am on a big ol' computer and I cannot bring this thing on the bus because I don't think they'll let me plug this into anything on a bus after the incident last time.

There have been hackers in most lobbies I've joined. The guns and their mods don't seem to matter, being replaced in importance by the act of holding down your preferred key for murder the moment you see any indication of movement in front of you no matter what you are wielding. Grenades will be flung with reckless abandon and explode a man three miles out from the blast radius. You will spawn in to three people shooting at you but it is the worst day of their lives because the spawn timer is so ludicrously long that you can blast all three of those people and probably get a fourth down to half health before the game allows them to fight back, which is a powerful feeling when you are not the one engaging somebody who was just born onto God's green earth with dual Uzis and the ability to never, ever die.

Is this game fun? Yes.

A match of this game takes anywhere from fifteen seconds to three minutes. Things unlock quickly in this game's battle pass, because of course it has a battle pass. There's no voice chat, but there is a "Huh Jump Sounds" volume slider for Quake fans. It is a great game to turn off your brain and click on people and watch them fall over with the same violent ragdoll physics one would expect from a Source engine body flopping against the floor as hard as it can.

Should you play this? Absolutely not! But yes, also. Mostly no. But maybe. Just don't buy anything.

Bye.

dinogen online is a game that dares to ask insightful questions, like "is there a balance to be struck in a battle between an allosaurus and an AC-130?"

the answer is no, there's absolutely not

You have to put your hands together and pray to do a lot of important things in The Light Brigade. This is good training, since you will be praying a lot during your runs! You will be praying that you can spot the malicious force who saw you blunder into a clearing, half-dead and abuzz with the power of several enchanted tarot cards, and opted to immediately slink into cover. You will pray that you're faster than it is when it reappears, its footsteps your only clue as to where it may be. You will pray that the corner you've trained the muzzle of your attachment-laden rifle on is even the correct one. You will pray that after this encounter you will stumble upon a medkit, or maybe some affordably-priced shopkeeper.

And you will pray you make it further on the next run.

There are a wide variety of programs on the market all aiming to be the best alternative to a real-world experience as you can get, but projected from within the comfort of your VR headset. Vermillion does an absolutely stellar job at placing you in the center of your own art studio, offers you a set of realistically simulated brushes and oil paints, and then it rounds the entire experience off with a myriad of intuitive UI functions for frustration-free creative output. There are also tons of useful features such as an integrated web browser and easy canvas exporting to multiple formats that will leave you looking forward to your next painting session every time.

a good game contains a skeleton. a great game contains a lot of skeletons. an incredible game? consider this: what if all of the skeletons were your friends?

learn a lot about czechoslovakia! shoot at a guy with a shotgun! the possibilities are endless